Nabokov's Dystopic 'Bend Sinister' Turns 65 by
Sam Kerbel in "The Jewish Daily Forward" Forward
(blog)
June 12, 2012, 11:00am
"It’s hard to imagine
Vladimir Nabokov as a commercial failure. Yet that was precisely what happened
with...the nightmarish and satirical dystopian novel “Bend Sinister,”
...Originally titled “The Person from Porlock,” then “Game to Gunm[etal]” and
later “Solus Rex,” “Bend Sinister” was Nabokov’s first novel composed in the
United States...it received only lackluster promotional treatment. [
] It didn’t help the book’s success that it garnered mostly mediocre to outright
negative reviews upon its release. The New Republic praised its fluent prose —
which “belies its author’s comparative unfamiliarity with the language” — while
disparaging Nabokov’s “apparent fascination with his own linguistic
achievement.” Diana Trilling published a notoriously scathing write-up in The
Nation two days after its release, arguing that “what looks like a highly
charged sensibility in Mr. Nabokov’s style is only fanciness, forced imagery,
and deafness to the music of the English language, just as what looks like
innovation in method is already its own kind of sterile convention.”
[ ] This is doubly unfortunate given the rich biographical history
from which “Bend Sinister” emerged, especially the author’s personal encounters
with anti-Semitism. Nabokov was raised by a father who stridently opposed
anti-Semitism in pre-1917 Russia, and in 1925 he married a Jewish woman, Véra
Slonim, with whom he raised a son in 1930s Germany. As an intensifying
anti-Semitic environment cost Véra her job and put Nabokov’s career in jeopardy,
they first moved to France and later fled to New York as Hitler’s troops marched
on Paris. Even in America, Nabokov frequently encountered anti-Jewish sentiment,
with one Russian professor at Columbia lamenting, 'All one hears here are
Yids'.”....